Can a fixed wing “drone” chase another fixed wing drone? Autonomously? How would it work? Pretty well actually, check out this video of my best “plane follow” ever!

In this video I try to give a non-technical explanation. How did I do?

I have other videos on my YouTube Channel that explain in a lot more technical detail. I wrote the Plane Follow feature in Lua script that runs in an H743 flight controller which continuously calculates the path of the lead plane and the path the chase plane needs to follow to tuck in behind it very accurately.

It wasn’t easy, but I’m very proud of the result.

Of course this is all based on ArduPilot – and some great work by the Dev Team, a leading Open Source project in the world of RPAS, drones, UAV, UAS.